Bringing ‘norms’ back home: Troop Contributing Countries and their domestic engagement with UN peacekeeping norms

This project seeks to understand how countries contributing troops to UN peacekeeping operations engage with peacekeeping norms, including, human rights, gender mainstreaming, and rule of law domestically. In the last decade, the UN, through its guidelines and standards, training requirements has sought to promote the compliance of these norms by peacekeepers deployed from various troop contributing countries (TCCs) (Karlsrud and Oksamytna 2019; Holmes 2019; Freedman 2021). Adherence to these norms by peacekeepers is seen to be central to regulating the conduct of peacekeepers on the ground, making UN peacekeeping compliant to UN resolutions, enhancing the legitimacy of peacekeeping, and even increasing their effectiveness in protecting civilians and maintaining peace. This normative activism of UN to promote norms as a part of peacekeeping operations have seen a mixed record in practice, as evidenced by reports of peacekeepers engaged in human rights violations and sexual abuse confirms.

To understand the gap between the UN increased advocacy for such norms and the routine violation of these by peacekeepers in practise, the scholarly and policy focus has centred on monitoring compliance and effective adherence to these norms when troops are deployed in host countries or during UN peacekeeping missions. Yet large scale quantitative studies have demonstrated that compliance with peacekeeping norms during missions rely on political and military cultures, and disciplinary mechanisms in security institutions in TCCs (Karim and Beardsley 2016; Moncrief 2017; Crawford, Lebovic, and Macdonald 2015; Rodriguez and Kinne 2019). For instance, that troops sent by states with stronger records of gender equality are less likely to engage in sexual exploitation and abuse while deployed to a UN peacekeeping mission (Karim and Beardsley 2016), or that the low numbers of female military personnel in peacekeeping reflects a lack of gender mainstreaming in national militaries (Newby and Sebag 2021). For most TCCs hailing from the Global South, and many fragile and conflict-affected themselves, institutionalisation of these norms is new, and their practice challenging. Further, the fact that contingents often may be directed by TCCs themselves even when deployed, allowing for significant influence of contributing countries (Leck 2009). Additionally, the fact that peacekeeping deployments are more reactive than proactive ensures than UN is limited in enforcing both external constraints to peacekeepers conduct, or promoting internalization of such norms, and principles, carving space for TCCs to wield greater influence in shaping the conduct of peacekeepers (Rodriguez and Kinne 2019).

This project seeks to fill this gap by examining internationalisation, contestation, and localisation of such norms by military institutions domestically in TCCs. Using empirical evidence from three of the largest TCCs, India, Bangladesh and Nepal, and centred on the study of three distinct peacekeeping norms: human rights, gender mainstreaming, and rule of law. The project will investigate:
•the mechanisms through which TCCs engage with peacekeeping norms; •challenges and incentives to comply with or resist these norms; •processes of how violation or deviation of these norms are handled;

This project seeks to address four-related questions which allows for generating critical evidence to inform how peacekeeping can be made more effective:

RQ1: How do security institutions (military and the Ministry of Defence) of TCCs engage with, and reference peacekeeping norms within their domestic legal, institutional and frameworks and everyday practices? RQ2: What normative and institutional changes has peacekeeping deployments brought to security institutions in troop contributing countries (TCCs)? RQ3: How are violations of these norms domestically within TCCs dealt with both within military organisations as well as within TCCs broadly, as well as by the UN? RQ4: What are the incentives and challenges--institutional, material, and ideation--that impact the adoption, appropriation, resistance, or part-compliance with these peacekeeping norms?